Bill Eadington, Economist and Gambling Expert, Dies at 67

Bill Eadington, an economist who was one of the first academics to study gambling, as both a force for economic development and a challenging social problem, died on Feb. 11 in Crystal Bay, Nev. He was 67.

The cause was cancer, said his colleague and friend Richard Schuetz.

Professor Eadington first visited Las Vegas in the late 1960s, and the trip began profitably. While his brother-in-law placed bets at a blackjack table at the Aladdin Casino, he stood behind him counting cards. Soon, they had won about $1,000. Professor Eadington, a math whiz, was pursuing his doctorate in economics at the time and briefly considered applying his skills as a professional gambler. Then he started losing — and he went back to graduate school in California.

Yet over time, he recalled in 2003, he became “a different kind of gambling addict.”

Professor Eadington was the longtime director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno. When he arrived in Reno in 1969 to join the university’s economics faculty, he recalled, he expected to find a library “filled with scholarly tomes dedicated to the nuances of gambling.” Few existed.

When he proposed the school’s first course on gambling economics in 1972, one of his guest speakers, a Reno casino pioneer, showed up armed and inebriated.

In 1974, Professor Eadington hosted the first National Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking. It drew not only gambling critics and academics but also casino executives. Known within the industry as the Eadington Conference and originally held annually, it has become one of the field’s most wide-ranging events, featuring international speakers, business school experts, poker players, anthropologists and advocates for gambling addicts.

“He arrived on campus in 1969 and, for all intents and purposes, invented the field of gambling studies,” said Bo Bernhard, a sociologist who is executive director of the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “As subfields began to emerge, he had a hand in those as well.”

He said Professor Eadington had the academic independence to navigate what might seem like conflicting worlds, doing consulting work for governments in South Africa and South Korea on the economic potential of gambling even as he served on the board of the National Council on Problem Gambling, which gave him a lifetime achievement award last year.

“Everybody went to him because he was the smartest guy,” Professor Bernhard said. “And he was completely unafraid of being critical of anyone or anything.”

Professor Eadington argued that groups with differing opinions about gambling would make more progress if they worked together, rather than reactively criticizing one another.

“There is still much heated rhetoric that argues on one hand that commercial gaming is ‘nothing more than a modern form of entertainment,’ and on the other that it is ‘one of the most pernicious evils to be thrust onto an unsuspecting public,’ ” he wrote in 2003. “However, the reality clearly lies between these extreme public relations positions.”

William Richard Eadington was born on Jan. 1, 1946, in Fullerton, Calif., and grew up in nearby Brea. He received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and economics from Santa Clara University and was just 23 when he completed his course work for a doctorate in economics at Claremont Graduate School.

He is survived by his wife of 45 years, the former Margaret Dean; a daughter, Diana Eadington-Reed; a son, Michael; and three grandchildren.

In 2011, Professor Eadington was elected to the American Gaming Association’s Hall of Fame, a small and eclectic group that includes Wayne Newton, Donald J. Trump and David Copperfield.

He often cited lessons he learned from a Methodist minister, Gordon Moody, who helped establish Gamblers Anonymous in Britain in the 1960s.

“I was struck,” Professor Eadington once wrote, “by Gordon’s disdain for other members of the cloth who were so judgmental about gambling, but who really had nothing to offer for those who suffered as a result of it, or for the policy makers who had to figure out how to balance the demands of a general public who wanted to gamble with the legitimate concerns about the negative side effects that result from making gambling available to large segments of the population.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill Eadington, 67, a Scholar of Gambling. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe